The use of dental floss is widely practiced and encouraged by dentists. Combined with brushing after meals, the use of dental floss in oral hygiene promotes healthy teeth and in particular, good oral health.
Dentists and other health professionals continue to encourage the use of flossing on a regular basis as an integral part of oral hygiene. However, there still is a certain resistance to flossing on the part of a certain portion of the public and furthermore, the technique of flossing employed by many people is not necessarily efficient in accomplishing the desired tasks. Normally, flossing is a manual operation wherein a piece of dental floss is cut from a spool of the same and is then wrapped around one or more fingers of each hand to leave a piece of active floss between the fingers. The tensioned floss is then rubbed along the sides of each tooth near the gum line to help remove plaque and food particles.
Many people find the above technique leads to discomfort as the floss is tightly wrapped around the fingers. Indeed, a certain number of users need to stop the flossing to permit blood flow to return to the fingers. This pain tends to discourage people from flossing.
The problem of dental floss waste also exists and while a certain amount of floss must be cut from the floss spool, the portion wrapped around the fingers is generally wasted.
It has been proposed in the art to provide various types of dispensers for use in flossing. However, none of these have received any wide degree of acceptance. Exemplary of such types of tools is that shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,570,710 to Wei et al.